Microsoft and RSS

Looks like MS has announced the big RSS news. The news? RSS integration into Longhorn (the OS) and IE. Apparently, the IE team is now the RSS team - you can see the Channel 9 video (warning - 1 hour long) here.

As usual with these channel 9 videos, the whole interview format just irritates me. I would much, much rather have a screencast showing me the cool stuff instead of an hour of blather that I really don't care about. Yes, it's nice to give the team some recognition. No, I still don't care :)

So what's new? Well, there's a roundup of links here, but the thing people are noticing is another RSS extension that allows for ordering of items. If I recall correctly, this was discussed on the Atom list, but I don't think they ever resolved it. About the time of the umpteenth "angels on the head of a pin" discussion, I tuned out. Anyhow - here's the Simple List Extension spec. I'm going to have to have a look see, and see what I'll have to do to deal with this in BottomFeeder.

In Longhorn, it looks like MS is trying to make RSS-centric development easier on the Windows platform. It looks to me like MS has given this some thought - but with Longhorn scheduled to be released sometime during the next millennium, it may not be that relevant.